By 
It may have taken a legion of vampires, blues music that transcends time and place, and, you know, the incredible talent of Ryan Coogler and his cast, but Sinners broke Oscar nomination records and took home five wins. Even more impressive is the fact that Sinners had such success despite hitting theaters in April, nearly a full year before Academy voters cast their ballots.
Usually, studios release their awards players in the fall, knowing that a movie that’s fresh in the voters’ minds will be more likely to earn votes. Yet, Sinners managed to be such a commercial hit and to garner such a mass audience that the film’s virtues remained in the public consciousness far longer than the average film. While such a feat is certainly unusual, another early year blockbuster just so happens to be earning big dollars at the box office and respect from critics. Will that popularity be enough to keep Project Hail Mary in the public eye all the way through next Oscar season?
Directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, written by Drew Goddard, and based on the novel by Andy Weir, Project Hail Mary stars Ryan Gosling as Ryland Grace, a school teacher who wakes up in a space station with no memory of how he got there. His two shipmates (Ken Leung and Milana Vayntrub) have died, and Ryland is many years from home. As his memory recovers, we see what brought Ryland to this point, that he was recruited by a German scientist (Sandra Hüller) on a mission to investigate the slow dimming of Earth’s sun.
As he regains his memory and turns his attention toward his mission, Grace finds an unlikely friend, an alien creature called Rocky, who has been sent on a similar mission. The two can work together to cure their loneliness and save their respective planets… if they could only learn how to communicate with one another.
Even clocking in at 156 minutes, Project Hail Mary is a pure crowd-pleaser. Lord and Miller, animation veterans behind hits such as The Lego Movie and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, as well as live-action favorites such as 21 Jump Street, know how to make the absurd and dense feel smart and accessible. The film moves quickly past knotty scientific concepts, but pauses for goofy bits. Gosling channels the affable charm that has made him a welcome screen presence for decades, holding the screen even when he’s all by himself.
But the real appeal of Project Hail Mary is its craft. Not only does it look incredible, using entirely practical effects instead of relying on computer graphics, but it also features an incredible puppet performance at the middle. Puppeteered by James Ortiz and a crew of four others, Rocky is both a fully modern character and a throwback to puppet and animatronirc figures from classic ’80s flicks like Short Circuit and The NeverEnding Story. The care on display with Rocky alone is enough to garner Oscar attention.
But will Project Hail Mary have the staying power to appeal to Oscar voters this time next year? The first weekend box office return suggests Project Hail Mary will have a long theatrical tail, but it has a lot of competition in the blockbuster space. Auteurs Christopher Nolan and Denis Villeneuve both have highly-anticipated movies this year with The Odyssey in the summer and Dune: Part Three in the winter.
Frankly, the name recognition and track-record of both those filmmakers create a formidable barrier to Project Hail Mary‘s Oscar hopes. But Grace and Rocky have also done the impossible on screen, so only a full would bet against them, no matter how desperate the odds.
Project Hail Mary is now in theaters worldwide.
The post Is Project Hail Mary This Year’s Sinners in the Oscars Race? appeared first on Den of Geek.
